TY - JOUR
T1 - Rapid expectation adaptation during syntactic comprehension
AU - Fine, Alex B.
AU - Jaeger, T. Florian
AU - Farmer, Thomas A.
AU - Qian, Ting
N1 - Funding Information:
an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to ABF, an NIH post-doctoral fellowship to TF (NIH training grant # T32 DC000035) and NSF- BCS-0845059, NSF CAREER IIS-1150028, NIHCD R01 HD075797, as well as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funding agencies. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Funding Information:
Funding: The work presented here was partially funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to ABF, an NIH post-doctoral fellowship to TF (NIH training grant # T32 DC000035) and NSF-BCS-0845059, NSF CAREER IIS-1150028, NIHCD R01 HD075797, as well as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funding agencies. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 Fine et al.This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2013/10/30
Y1 - 2013/10/30
N2 - When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genres). Two self-paced reading experiments investigate changes in readers' syntactic expectations based on repeated exposure to sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities (so-called "garden path sentences"). These sentences typically lead to a clear expectation violation signature when the temporary ambiguity is resolved to an a priori less expected structure (e.g., based on the statistics of the lexical context). We find that comprehenders rapidly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the local statistics of novel environments. Specifically, repeated exposure to a priori unexpected structures can reduce, and even completely undo, their processing disadvantage (Experiment 1). The opposite is also observed: A priori expected structures become less expected (even eliciting garden paths) in environments where they are hardly ever observed (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that, when changes in syntactic statistics are to be expected (e.g., when entering a novel environment), comprehenders can rapidly adapt their expectations, thereby overcoming the processing disadvantage that mistaken expectations would otherwise cause. Our findings take a step towards unifying insights from research in expectation-based models of language processing, syntactic priming, and statistical learning.
AB - When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genres). Two self-paced reading experiments investigate changes in readers' syntactic expectations based on repeated exposure to sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities (so-called "garden path sentences"). These sentences typically lead to a clear expectation violation signature when the temporary ambiguity is resolved to an a priori less expected structure (e.g., based on the statistics of the lexical context). We find that comprehenders rapidly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the local statistics of novel environments. Specifically, repeated exposure to a priori unexpected structures can reduce, and even completely undo, their processing disadvantage (Experiment 1). The opposite is also observed: A priori expected structures become less expected (even eliciting garden paths) in environments where they are hardly ever observed (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that, when changes in syntactic statistics are to be expected (e.g., when entering a novel environment), comprehenders can rapidly adapt their expectations, thereby overcoming the processing disadvantage that mistaken expectations would otherwise cause. Our findings take a step towards unifying insights from research in expectation-based models of language processing, syntactic priming, and statistical learning.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0077661
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0077661
M3 - Article
C2 - 24204909
AN - SCOPUS:84905301156
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 8
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 10
M1 - e77661
ER -